Navigating around ibm.com to find support resources for the different form factors of IBM Cast Iron can sometimes feel like a cumbersome task. There are many products in the IBM portfolio and a number of associated web pages. The purpose of this article is to provide a consolidated set of links to key support content that can help you be more self-sufficient. A good starting point is the Cast Iron Client Success Portal . It's here that you'll find links to additional support tools and resources. See the... [More]

Sometimes troubleshooting Work Load Management (WLM) issue in IBM WebSphere Application Server can be challenging. This blog helps address common issues with this component before calling IBM support and save you time. 1. How does WLM participate in load balancing EJB requests in at WebSphere Cluster? For an Overview of WLM load balancing for EJB see: Clusters and workload management For a more technical description in the context of large topology see section 2.1.5.1 EJB workload management in the... [More]

High Availability Manager (HAManager/HAM) is a backbone of WebSphere Application Server (WAS). It provides multiple fail-over facilities to multiple components in WAS. WLM, ODC, SIB, DynaCache, DRS, HTTP session and many more components use the HAManager Framework to make themselves highly available, to avoid SPOF (single point of failure). Most of the time we receive a problem record (PMR) or service request (SR) stating HA Manager is causing many issues, but in most of these cases it will be a component that is using the HA Manager not... [More]

Occasionally, you might encounter behavior in the IBM WebSphere Batch component that is not expected. These are the some of most common problems and the corresponding resolutions are in addition to those documented as technotes and available in the product documentation. This is not intended to be a comprehensive list of all of the issues that you might encounter while working with the WebSphere Batch component. 1. Lifecycle Consistency 1.1. Job stuck in submitted / restartable / executing state a. Job stuck in submitted: When you... [More]

When it comes to troubleshooting native memory issues , typically where WebContainer transport is concerned, two troubleshooting methods are quite popular: 1) Disable AIO 2) Setting the WebSphere Application Server WebContainer to synchronous mode Both troubleshooting steps aim to avoid the large native memory footprint that may occur when using AIO or Asynchronous data transfer. Much of the underlying native memory consumers in the WebContainer I/O are the... [More]

Debugging Java exceptions is not always easy to do as the exception messages are often too generic. IBM SDK has provided a mechanism for triggering additional data generated on various events using the -Xdump option. It allows an additional level of filtering on the method that is throwing the exception. Javacore and System dump are useful to capture detailed information about the general state of the Java runtime and the application running on it. We can generate those dumps on purpose when certain exception raises from specified... [More]

IBM Business Process Manager (BPM) supports powerful, high-performance business process management while providing a simple way to model business processes. BPM is based on WebSphere Application Server and includes many components. So it can be complicated when you hit a performance issue, as the performance issue can occur in any component. This blog will discuss the required information and data for troubleshooting the performance issue by yourself or the IBM Support team. Benchmark your application before putting it into production... [More]

There are times when Ninja like skills are needed for text search and replace. One example is the instance deletion script. For WebSphere Lombardi Edition V7.2 and IBM Business Process Manager (BPM) V7.5, stored procedures are the options. For BPM 8.0.1 and later, you will want to use the BPMProcessInstanceCleanup command . To make a list of numbers quickly available for the deletion script, we can use some fancy search and replace. For this example I am using Notepad++ . Other powerful text editors can do the... [More]

Gathering information is essential for proper problem diagnosis and knowing up front what information to collect can help save you time and expedite your problem to faster resolution. In IBM Support, we have created "MustGather" documents that are designed specifically to help you organize and gather this relevant information with ease. Our IBM PureApplication Support team especially wants you to learn how to use our MustGather documents as we know you're very busy and want a fast and efficient client... [More]

If you are like most clients, you are excited about the NEW Call Home Feature (aka Service and Support Manager) in IBM PureApplication System V2.0. The feature allows the system to not only monitor for events that occur, but also has the ability to create a Service Request (SR) - the new term for Problem Management Record (PMR) - automatically based on a generated event and upload the relevant logs to the SR for you. This allows the Technical Support Representative (TSR) the ability to immediately begin troubleshooting the cause of the... [More]

A wealth of valuable JVM diagnostic data can be gathered by doing the following tasks: Generate a Java™ thread dump. Enable logging of verbose garbage collection data for Server. Generate a Java heap dump. Generate a system core dump & snap trc file. In the overall process of problem determination, diagnostic data must be collected or generated, and the data must be analyzed. Various tools are available to help you analyze diagnostic data for solving problems. Below are the links for the analysis of javacore, verbosegc,... [More]

If you're having some trouble with your Java™ application, be it JSE or JEE, you've probably been looking at javacores (also called thread dumps or java dumps). If not, you should be and that is a topic for another day. When looking at the javacores with all those threads in there, have you ever wanted to know things like: Which user is causing these threads to spawn? What were they doing in the application? When did that thread get created? Well want no longer! With a few lines of some very simple Java code... [More]

In CICS support, we look at lots of dumps. Sometimes, these dumps have lots of tasks, especially when your production region goes maxtasks or is short on storage. How can you quickly make sense of all these tasks? Fault Analyzer has some ways to help you quickly sort it all out. Let's take a look at the CICS information in a CICS System dump: Next, we will take a look at the CICS Dispatcher Domain: Now we can view a list of all the tasks in the system dump at the time simply by selecting option 1: Once the... [More]

Sometimes, during the course of testing or troubleshooting, we need to really understand what is going on in the depths of the WebSphere code when our enterprise application executes it's logic. When the basic log output from the server does not provide enough data to surmise what the root cause of the problem is we must then collect verbose tracing data from the server in hopes to capture the sequence of events that are occurring (or not occurring) while the application is running. This is where reference traces can become... [More]

Many times, while working with Java™-related programs, we run into situations where the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) will not start because of some memory related issues. In this article, we will cover one of these types of these memory-related problems. We will accomplish this through the use of a technique and a freely downloadable tool. Prerequisite Knowledge To get the most out of this article, the reader should posses the following skills and knowledge: Basic understanding of the Java Virtual Machine Basic Windows... [More]

What is the problem? Have you ever run into a problem in WebSphere Message Broker (WMB) and you just were not sure where to start looking to find help or to find the solution? Have you ever started working on a problem in WMB and you were able to get started looking for the answer but you ended up going down the wrong path? Have you ever had a problem in WMB and you found the solution but you were left with questions because you were not sure how you got from the problem symptoms to the final solution? Have you ever just wanted to... [More]

Whenever you encounter a problem, whether it is in development, test, or production, it seems you are always in a race against time to resolve it. If you are not prepared to run that race, you may find yourself crossing the finish line in the dark after everyone else has gone home. This holds true for almost any problem you may encounter. Problems within WebSphere MQ Publish and Subscribe (PUB/SUB) are no exception to that rule, but there are some things you can do to train yourself for that race if there ever comes a time when you have to... [More]

This has happened to people who report problems to the Support Center... You call and wait anxiously for a call back and later to find out that you did not submit enough information. You are told "The logs you uploaded did not contain the details we are looking for". You are thinking .. how could that be? Here is a simple tip to help improve your turnaround time when you open a ticket with WebSphere Partner Gateway (WPG) Support Center - Always have your debug logs uploaded! How are debug logs different from "non-debug"... [More]

I'll preface this post with two facts: 1. I'm an IBMer and I am not impartial to WebSphere and IBM Java tm , and 2. my primary job function involves solving (sometimes extraordinary) customer problems. That aside, what I wanted to discuss in this post is a comparison between the serviceability capabilities of the IBM JDK and what we'll call: "the other guys". "The other guys" will suffice for a description of any non-IBM Java SDK for the purposes of this post. This post will not be an all inclusive resource for the... [More]